Often with romaji, a ``-'' is used to link related phrases.
For example, (``in Japanese'') should be romanized
nihongode, but is often romanized nihongo-de. Unfortunately,
this is indistinguishable from nihongoude. Therefore, this server
neither accepts nor generates romaji with this ``linking dash''.

so in theory, romaji
should have no spaces as well. Unfortunately, students (and teachers)
often use romaji as a crutch to escape the ``difficult task'' of
learning kana, and find using spaces makes this crutch easier.

The Japanese in edict has no spaces, so besides being a poor
crutch, using spaces in the romaji you feed this server would make no
sense. Therefore, this server removes any spaces from the romaji you
type (keeping in mind the next item in this list, it might sometimes
add a single quote).

In situations where an ``n'' could be vague, as in ``na''
being , use a single quote to force the latter.
Therefore, something like ``kenichi'' will be interpreted as
while ``ken'ichi'' will be interpreted as .

Often, romaji is used to map a Japanese word or name into another
language (such as English), and in such cases the linguistic
conventions of the target language would take hold. In English, this
would mean that proper names and sentences' first words would be
capitalized, i.e. ``Taro Tanaka''.

Romaji is used in this server not to map Japanese to English (or
any other language), but to merely map it to an encoding which most
systems in the world can handle. That being the case, using upper
case in the romaji would make no sense. The example name above would
be written ``tanakataro''.

combinations such as , which are represented in
intuitive ways (as ``fa'' and ``che'' respectively).

Various other mappings of interest:

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